Soon Clarke has indulged his slightly condescending screwball tendencies to the point where this comic novel is in overdrive. Sam has an angry stalker, the son of the loafered couple who perished in the Dickinson fire. Sam becomes a suspect when other New England writers' homes begin to burn. And he is dogged by the overweening ambition of his prison buddies, a bunch of bond analysts eager to write best-selling memoirs even though they don't have anything interesting to remember.
When this leads Sam to open his wide, dewy eyes to the present-day literary world, he finds that the memoir is "like the Soviet Union of literature, having mostly gobbled up the smaller, obsolete states of fiction and poetry." He finds this truly baffling: "Who knew that there were so many people with so many necessary things to say about themselves?" He wonders how a newspaper reporter from upstate New York can begin a book with the line "I was working as a newspaper reporter in upstate New York."
Even as Sam begins collecting insights for a book of his own, the Arsonist's Guide of Clarke's title, he runs headlong into practitioners of other literary genres. The parodies here are priceless, particularly the grim, depressive, snowbound story of a lonely and miserable man, one that instantly brings to mind Russell Banks' Affliction.
Clarke sets this part of the book in bleakest New Hampshire, so that Sam can feel sorry for the houses for "having to be compared to the white snow and failing so completely." This frozen setting also allows him to express a long-smoldering schoolboy hatred of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome.
Eventually over-plotted to the point of overkill, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (Miriam Levine's real guidebook has the same title, absent the arson) still manages to remain sharp-edged and unpredictable, punctuated by moments of choice absurdist humor. At the home of Edward Bellamy, the author of Looking Backward, Sam notes: "It was very, very pretty. You wouldn't have noticed anything was wrong with it except that it was ringed by yellow police tape, and there were some faint black singe marks near the foundation."
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